Oh, cheer up! Mars and Bellona are still on the job, ever kindly looking out for those who look out for themselves. Why, I just read about it in today's Wall Streeet Jingo !

"History has shown time and again that military confrontation does work . [One] could achieve military victory by eliminating or incarcerating [enemy] leadership, not two or three a month (so that they are replaceable) but a few hundred at once. By breaking its command structure and its logistical apparatus, [the enemy] can be rendered inoperative. But for this to happen, [one] must treat the terrorists' mortal challenge as a war for survival, not as a series of skirmishes. And in war, you must fight to win, by all traditional means."

(The original was about one specific case, it doesn't matter which, but the beautiful sentiment generalizes well, does it not? I'm undecided about replacing "terrorists' mortal challenge" with "[mortal challenge from the enemy]" -- you might try it both ways yourself and decide what you think.)

The WSJ clausewitz has answered in advance petty obsolete objections like "[E]arly attack against threats that were latent, before they became imminent[, a] concept developed within one security structure[,] was shoe-horned into another in order to give it a legitimating [p]edigree. Moreover, whereas in its earlier incarnation it was designed to prevent war, in its new [f]ormat it was intended to provoke it." What horsefeathers that is! Is the student expected to be unaware that Dr. Strangelove and Kahn of RAND and Kissinger of Harvard had nukes and nothing but nukes on their mind from 1945 through 1991, whereas up-to-date Mil. Sci. (i.e., that vouchsafed to mankind since 11.IX.2001) specifically excludes them? "By all TRADITIONAL means," insists the Jingo gentleman with crystal clarity. That exclusion means that one does not ‘shoehorn’ minor deviations into some delapidated Cold War paradigm, one simply forgets everything strategic-operational-tactical from before the Big Bang altogether, retaining only the profoundly inspirational thought that WAR CAN STILL WORK! [1]

As I rush off to the Museum of Strategic Studies in search of more picturesque quaintnesses, I wonder whether any of the dryasdusts will have noticed the important rôle played by Dr. General Petraeus of Princeton and the GOP in rehabilitating one's basic confidence in Mars and Bellona. For an extended period, the GWOTniks carried on in their semiconquered provinces of Mesopotamia as if they had deliberately resolved to refute, rather than vindicate, WAR CAN STILL WORK. Sheer incompetence, no doubt, explains their sad record, without any need to assume deliberate paedagogic intent, let alone secret sympathy with Global Tourism, Heaven forbid! The Doctor-General has been ludicrously overpraised by his fans at the Weekly Standard and elsewhere, but it will not do to pretend that Joe Blow could have done as well either. A captious critic might insist, not without a certain show of justice, that D. Petræus has not so much vindicated the workability of War as that of Martial Law, proving by practical demonstration that an able general officer can still accomplish with troops and bombs and bayonets pretty much what the New York Police Department ordinarily accomplishes with other mechanisms.

But even on those terms, there has been a useful contribution here. The world has become a less precarious place now that all doubt is removed that a (hyperpowerful) state with 300,000,000 citizens can seize possession of, and maintain elementary law and order in, (backward) provinces inhabited by perhaps 25,000,000 neosubjects. However antecedently likely that proposition may be in the abstract, yet for a while it hung in the balance, or seemed to hang. The Doctor-General has spared us all the nightmare of a radically unpredictable world in which each encounter between Godzilla and Bambi might go either way. Sanity has reasserted itself, so to speak; the prudent investor has been reassured that indeed she ought to bet her chips on the big battalions the same way as ever. Whatever changes ‘9/11’ may have wrought, that is not among them.

I doubt anybody at the Museum of Strategic Studies takes exactly that view of the Petraean performance, though there is no compelling reason known to me why not.

WAR CAN STILL WORK! Happy days.


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[1] Dr. Strachan is so bogged down in the snows of yesteryear, wheels spinning furiously, that he cannot see what is under his nose. No GWOTnik of stature maintains that Blair and Bush commenced hostilities. It is undeniable, surely, that GT struck the first blow, and thus "declared war" insofar as anybody still bothers with such elegant mediaeval formalities?

The word ‘preëmptive’ does admittedly occur in explanations and apologies concerning both the Strangelovean theory of "first strikes" and "counterforce strikes" and in the Crawfordites’ attested practices of aggression and occupation, but the things the word applies to differ wildly. B&B did not, to put it mildly, invasionize Afghanistan and the former Iraq in order to preveserve the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre from impending attack, or to lessen the damage done to those edifices. Yet that would have been the whole point of the exercise, if shoehorns had had anything to do with it. 'Nuff said.